The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Friday, July 28, 2017

Almost forty years ago, Rita Swan and her husband,
then devout Christian Scientists, prayed and watched as their toddler son died
without the medical treatment that could have saved his life. Many people would
emerge from this experience embittered or self-loathing and turn to drugs or
alcohol to sustain them in a lifetime effort to avoid their memories.

Instead of succumbing to bitterness, Rita and her husband
created an organization that has worked ever since to help educate parents and
to push for legislation and law enforcement countering religious practices that
bring suffering and possible death to young children. The organization is CHILD-- Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty. Rita
has maintained two websites, www.childrenshealthcare.org and www.idahochildren.org.
Childrenshealthcare.org contains material about all the work of the
organization over the years and describes a multitude of cases in which
mistaken beliefs caused harm to children. The most recent newsletter from CHILD
recounts events of faith-based medical neglect in Idaho, and the position of
one group of parents that children have no rights, that there are many medical
errors made, and that medicine is in any case “of Satan”. This group apparently
reports neither births nor deaths of children, so it is impossible to know how
many children have died unnecessarily, but there are many child graves on the
group’s property.

Rita Swan is now retiring as president of CHILD and
the work of the organization is being taken over by the legal scholar Marci
Hamilton of the University of
Pennsylvania. The new organization’s website is www.childusa.org. Much remains to be done,
and in a final letter Rita Swan states that she will continue to work on issues
in Washington State, where Christian Scientists are exempt from charges of
criminal mistreatment, second-degree murder, and failure to report abuse.

No one says that it is always easy to know when it is
right to give children medical treatment and when it is right to withhold it.
The recent case of the infant Charlie Gard has shown some of the many conflicts
over decisions that no more can be done for a child and that further attempts
simply prolong suffering. However, arguments based on the ideas that children
have no rights, or that a supreme being will be insulted by parents’ lack of
faith if they seek medical help, really cannot be allowed to influence either
difficult or easy decisions about children’s health care. Nor, in spite of all
respect and concern for parents’ relationships with their children, can a
community allow parents to make decisions alone while under the enormous stress
of caring for a very sick child. We all have a stake in these decisions and the
precedents they set for the future.

Rita Swan has done so much to clarify personal and
legal thinking on these issues. Thank you, Rita, from everyone concerned with
children’s welfare!

Friday, July 21, 2017

From time to time I see advertisements for a
residential treatment center known as CALO (www.caloteens.com),
or for programs apparently related to this model. The programs provide
residential treatment for children and teenagers who, the proprietors claim,
are difficult to parent because they suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder.
RAD is said to make them lonely and miserable, unable to “bond” with others,
uncooperative, poor school achievers, etc., etc. As occurs all too often, these
proprietors note their belief that adoption even at birth is likely to result
in these undesirable outcomes.

Let’s have a look at one CALO website, where “our
proprietary treatment” is described at www.caloteens.com/message2.html.
I want to note first that “proprietary treatment” is a term generally reserved
for methods whose details are considered to be trade secrets, statements about
which are protected as commercial speech in the United States. Unlike
information about research-validated, evidence-based treatments, for which
details are easily available if you know where to look, proprietary treatments are
difficult and usually quite expensive to learn about-- as a rule, you have to sign up for workshops
or seminars or buy material from a suggested reading list sold only through the
proprietors.

Material at caloteens.com suggests that a major CALO
concern has to do with a rivalry with behavioral modification programs. As is
typical of non-evidence-based, commercially driven proprietary treatment
programs, the CALO discussion argues that behavior modification, which is seen
as a rival, replicates harmful situations that have already affected the
children, and that recovery from childhood problems must begin “with the heart”
and be followed later by behavior change. It is not stated with any clarity how
any “heart” changes can be detected before they are followed by behavior
change, and therefore it is far from clear how CALO’s claimed (but unlisted)
research basis could have been established.

The CALO website also stresses the need for
specialized treatment of childhood mental health problems, and notes that their
staff are specialists in treatment of attachment and trauma disorders, as
described and trained by groups like ATTACh and the Attachment & Trauma
Network. These comments are red flags for the possibility of two difficulties
often associated with proprietary treatments.

One is the assumption that some single factor, such as
attachment, is the single most important cause of a wide range of developmental
and emotional problems; like the bed of Procrustes, this assumption compresses
or stretches problems caused by combinations of biological and environmental
problems so that they “fit” the chosen bed—in this case, the attachment bed. As
has been pointed out by the British psychologists Woolgar and Scott, this sort
of single-factor explanation opens the door to choices that ignore not only
complex causes, but even simple factors that differ from the chosen cause.

A second red flag has to do with the assumption that
the details of a CALO program are of necessity essential for treatment.
However, serious work in clinical psychology has for years focused on general
or shared factors that contribute to good outcomes achieved through treatments
that are different in details. In some cases, such as EMDR, specific details
(like eye movement) may have nothing to do with positive outcomes, which
probably result from general helpful factors like empathic responses. The CALO claim
to uniqueness of its program is thus not likely to be a strong argument for
people with training in understanding therapeutic approaches—but it is quite
likely to appeal to worried parents.

However, let’s go on to my favorite bit of the CALO
website. This is the part about golden retriever therapy and the transfer of
“attachment lessons” learned from dogs, to human relationships. Kids in CALO
programs take care of dogs; they are said to “learn trust” from the dogs,
therefore to understand attachment, and therefore (with some additional,
undescribed help) to transfer the attachment they have learned from the dog to
a human being. This is quite an interesting idea, but one that makes a common
but mistaken assumption about emotional development, and also one that betrays
considerable confusion about how attachment works and what an attachment
relationship is.

The first issue here is one that I have often termed “ritual
reenactment”. The basic idea is that if certain events lead to a positive outcome
for infants and young children, those events, reenacted in some way in later
life, will recapitulate normal development and correct any problems that occurred
when they were wrongly experienced earlier on. This belief has appeared in many
forms from Sandor Ferenczi’s “babying” of patients to the methods of Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann as fictionalized in I Never
Promised You a Rose Garden to Nancy
Thomas’s insistence on bottle-feeding older children. None of these methods has
ever been shown to be effective, but somehow the thought of a “do-over”
continues to have a strong appeal to the public.

But-- suppose
that just for the sake of argument we accepted the idea of the “do-over”, would
caring for a golden retriever be a way to do this? A comparison of the ordinary
and the “treatment” situations says it would not. In typical early development,
a child is cared for by a consistent and responsive small group of adults. The
adults care for the infant physically,
but they also spend much time showing their positive feelings about him or her,
working toward communication of child to adult and adult to child, and enjoying
play and social interactions that bring pleasure to both adult and baby. The
outcome of these experiences is that the toddler stays close to the familiar
adult if anything is scary or distressing, can be comforted by the adult hen
distressed, and explores new things best if allowed to have contact with a
familiar person at will. (This set of behaviors has been summarized as “trust”
or as “attachment”, although those terms really apply to a hypothesized inner
state that guides the behavior. ) Well before school age, children put their
social experiences to work to build a set of ideas about how people interact socially,
sometimes called an internal working model of social relations (IWM). The IWM
continues to develop, sometimes along new lines, as the child grows and has new
social experiences.

How does that set of events compare to caring for a
dog? First of all, the roles are reversed. The human being acts as the “parent”
and the dog as the “child”. If the boy or girl does a good job of nurturing and
playing with the dog, the dog will develop trust in the boy or girl—but certainly
not an exclusive trust, especially if the dog is a very sociable golden
retriever. The CALO website says that the child learns empathy for the dog and
therefore becomes more empathic toward his or her parents, but it is far from
clear how either of these things could happen. If a child is a callous,
unemotional individual, in what way will doing the work of caring for a dog teach
or motivate empathic skills? And, if the child did become able to empathize
with a dog, read the dog’s signals, become aware of the dog’s usual needs, even
realize that any golden will convey that he needs yet another roast beef
sandwich because there really wasn’t any meat in the one you just gave him—how do
any of these skills relate to the more complex needs and messages of human
beings, the facial expressions, the body language, and all the other factors
that influence empathic responses? How
do any of these enter into the IWM’s further development? Indeed, if trust and
attachment were transferable, there would presumably be no attachment disorders
in adopted children, as all (according to the CALO website) must have been
attached to adults in the past, even at birth, so they ought to be able to hand
that attachment package over to a new caregiver, just as they are claimed to “transfer”
attachment from a dog to a human.

Since the relatively new developmental trauma disorder
fad came on the scene, I’ve been expecting to see fewer extravagant claims
about attachment, but it seems that CALO and similar groups are getting all the
juice they can out of the mythology of attachment. And, of course, therapy
dogs, emotional support animals, etc. are now in fashion, so why not bring in
the golden retrievers too?

Perhaps we’re lucky that they haven’t decided to
create attachment through pot-bellied pigs.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Communications and interactions between the United
States and Russia are marked by suspicions and sanctions these days. Some
commodities that used to be readily available in Russia are no longer imported
from the West.

Regrettably, sanctions have not prohibited the export
to Russia from the United States of various pseudoscientific ideas about
psychology and child development. In particular, we are seeing the spread in
Russia of the theories and practices of “attachment therapists” and their
helpers who subscribe to the use of “Nancy Thomas parenting” with vulnerable
children.

Some readers will already know exactly what I am
talking about, but for those who do not, I’ll supply some brief definitions.
“Attachment therapy”, sometimes known as “holding therapy”, is an implausible,
non-evidence-based treatment claimed by its proponents to be effective for
certain childhood mental health problems. Advocates of “attachment therapy”
(AT) also claim that their principles are derived from the work of John Bowlby,
the originator of attachment theory, a framework for understanding the feelings
and behavior of young children with respect to familiar and unfamiliar adults.
As I have pointed out in other posts on this blog and in various print
publications, the beliefs about attachment employed by AT proponents share
almost nothing with Bowlby’s theory, but are instead essentially retrofitted to
provide a rationale for AT practices such as restraining children physically,
shouting at and intimidating them.

Two other points to define here: AT proponents
describe adopted and foster children as suffering from Reactive Attachment
Disorder, a real though rare psychiatric syndrome described in DSM-5 and ICD.
However, the alarming symptoms they list, including eventual serial killing,
have nothing to do with the symptoms of RAD. They form instead a pattern that I
have referred to as faux-RAD , resulting in a counterfeit disorder to
be treated with a counterfeit therapy. Finally—and to my mind perhaps most
importantly—AT advocates claim that their restraint treatments need to be
accompanied by adjuvant methods sometimes referred to as “Nancy Thomas
parenting”, created and taught by one Nancy Thomas, a self-identified
instructor of foster parents, who recommends limiting the amount and variety of
a child’s diet, withholding information as well as food from the child,
requiring the child to ask permission for “privileges” like a drink of water or
use if the toilet, and so on. These methods, joined with rocking the child like
a baby and hand-feeding him caramels (yes, really, but I don’t want to take
time to explain her reasoning right now) are said by Thomas and her followers to
correct attachment problems that adopted and foster children may have
experienced, and as a result to render the children docile, grateful, and
affectionate. (The actual results of this kind of treatment in one case may be seen at http://www.wbay.com/cotent/news/Wrightstown-couple-accused-of-starving-adopted-son-mentally-abusing-him-433665943.html
--- and this case is not an outlier.)

AT and “Nancy Thomas parenting” (NTP) had their
beginnings in the United States, and they have always seemed to me to have a
peculiarly American, pioneer spirit, rough frontier justice, snake-oil salesman
flavor to them—like something out of Mark Twain. Other countries have their own
ways of abusing children (as witness the old German “black pedagogy”), but AT
and NTP seem to be genuinely “made in America”. Our British cousins have picked
AT up a bit, but on the whole their [former] EU membership made them somewhat
wary about legal concerns related to maltreatment.

Now, however, we see Russia picking up AT and NTP with
apparent great enthusiasm. For some years. American advocates of authoritarian
child treatments have flirted with Russia, occasionally being invited to speak,
and occasionally being prevented from speaking. In the last few years, an
influx of AT proponents and AT ideas has penetrated Russia—in spite of the very
clear fact that Russian adoptees who were harmed in the United States, leading
to the ban on foreign adoptions, were in many cases harmed by AT and NTP
practices! This connection appears to be invisible to groups of Russians who
have hurried to encourage adoption of large groups of children from orphanages
and have sustained the belief that they can “fix” these children by following
AT and NTP precepts.

What exactly has happened in Russia? I have been
receiving a series of descriptive comments from Mihail Able (see comments at
childmyths.blogspot,com/2017/07/the-russian-adoption-ban-magnitsky-act.html;
scroll down to the comments section, and please understand that Mihail is doing
this with Google Translate). Mihail discusses specific families’ problems
resulting from their acceptance of AT and NTP principles and practices.

In addition, my friend and esteemed colleague Yulia
Massino has been following with distaste news of tours in which Nancy Thomas
herself has come to instruct the Russians how they should deal with adopted and
foster children. She has made her usual claims of “curing” 87% of children who
have come to her as crazed future killers. (For some reason, the numbers 80%,
85%, 87% have great power in AT circles,
although of course there have never been systematic studies either of the
children’s initial conditions or of the outcomes of NTP or similar treatments -- much less any randomized trials, and much
less any detailed publications.) Interestingly, Thomas describes this trip as a
“missionary” trip without mentioning the country visited (http://www.facebook.com/ntparenting/posts/1322659427848500).

Following Thomas, there has recently been an exporting
trip by staff of the Attachment Institute of New England, an organization that
has for many years pushed AT principles and practices. Yulia Massino wrote
about this trip on her own blog, http://yuliamass.livejournal.com/232733.html and http://yuliamass.livejournal.com/235689.html (in Russian; use Google translate to read).
She pointed out the activities of the two AT visitors, Ken Frohock and Megan “Peg”
Kirby, who raised money from sympathizers for their trip and now describe it on
the AINE Facebook page and announce lectures at their website http://www.attachmentnewengland.com.

A 2007 press release from AINE (www.attachmentnewengland.com/press.html
) referred to their therapy as utilizing parental eye contact and parental
holding of children. The same press release mentioned a presentation by Nancy
Thomas and referred to her training with Foster Cline, probably the best-known
proponent of intrusive, authoritarian treatments targeting adopted and foster
children. AINE has never recanted publicly from these positions; they have in
the last few years picked up the most recent terms having to do with trauma,
but have not stated any changes in their treatment methods. Although I do not
know exactly what they said or did on their trip to Russia, if they were horses
I would bet that their track record of AT and NTP involvement would be the best
predictor of their performance there.

It seems that a fruitful new market has opened in
Russia for the export of pseudoscience manufactured in the U.S. Interestingly,
Yulia Massino has told me that the concept of emotional attachment, which “everybody
knows” (not always correctly) in the U.S. and U.K., has not been discussed much
in Russia. This may leave many Russians open to the impression that attachment,
and therefore AT, is a brand new discovery of ingenious Western scientists. Fortunately
a new article in circulation by Michael Ivanov may help counter this impression—but
I am very much afraid that Russians are not learning from observation of the
ill effects these beliefs have had for children in the U.S. You would think
they might remember the harm done to Russian adoptees in the U.S. some years
ago…

You can see Michael Ivanov's new article at https://www.researchgate.net/publications/318420576_Harmful_Treatments_in_Child_Psychotherapy.

Monday, July 10, 2017

On July 9 and 10, 2017, the New York Times published articles by Jo Becker,
Matt Apuzzo, and Adam Goldman on the subject of meetings between Trump campaign
representatives and a Russian lawyer during the 2016 election campaign. These
articles reiterate a common belief about the Russian prohibition of adoption of
Russian children to the United States—they claim that Putin put this
restriction in place when infuriated by the Magnitsky Act of 2012 and the
sanctions it put on Russia.

It may well be that Putin was annoyed by the restrictions,
but concerns about the fates of Russian children in the United States had
started rather earlier in both countries. Russian-adopted children had appeared
repeatedly in news reports of ill-treatment and even child deaths. In 201l, I
commented on this at https://childmyths.blogspot.com/2011/11/nathaniel-craver-case-many.html.
In the same year, www.childrenintherapy.org/news.html
discussed the USA-Russia Adoption Treaty, with reference to child maltreatment;
at that time, Pavel Astakhov, the then-ombudsman for children in Russia, had
been asking for continued contact with children adopted from Russia to the U.S.
and for continuing their status as Russian citizens. Also in 2011, this issue
was discussed at https://phtherapies.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/reactive-attachment-disorder-rad-dispelling-the-myths/.
The Beagley case in Alaska, involving mistreatment and “hot-saucing” of a
Russian-adopted boy, caused much horrified discussion in both the U.S. and
Russia.

All of these very genuine concerns about inappropriate
treatment of Russian children in U.S. adoptive families were under discussion
before the Magnitsky Act. There is no question in my mind that Russian
adoptees, as well as children adopted from other places, were in many cases
badly mistreated by adoptive parents who had bought into mistaken beliefs about
attachment and about Reactive Attachment Disorder. These parents had been told by “attachment
experts” that emotional attachment of children to parents occurred because of
power assertion by the parents, and that such attachment was essential to
prevent later vicious criminal behavior. The parents believed this, and they
did assert power by physical means including withholding food and exposing
children to cold and other discomfort. In some cases, they countered
disobedience by forcing children to eat or drink large amounts, sometimes
causing death.

Pavel Astakhov investigated these problems carefully
and recommended prohibiting adoption of Russian children to foreign countries. One
part of his reasoning about the U.S. is that this country has never ratified
the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children, a distinction that we share only
with Somalia.

The point I am making here has nothing to do with the
Trump campaign or any election events, of course. I simply want to remind
people that the ban on Russian adoption is not a simple tit-for-tat reprisal
created by Putin in response to the Magnitsky Act. It was based on very real
events in this country, and I could only wish that Americans could ban adoption
of American children to persons who are likely to use attachment-therapy
related power assertion methods that have harmed children in the past—and are
still harming them today.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

When people talk about evolution of structures and
functions or of behaviors through natural selection, they sometimes use an
intriguing metaphor. They suggest that human evolution can have a an aspect
that can be compared to a spandrel—an architectural feature like an arch that
was originally developed as a way to support a building, but that later was
liked for its attractive appearance and put to work as a way to decorate a
structure. It seems possible that human evolutionary change involves spandrels
too, with traits that began with one function later becoming useful in other
ways. For instance, eyebrows might originally have been useful for keeping
sweat out of our eyes, but now are used in facial expressions and gestures that
convey our moods and intentions to people we encounter.

Can young children’s emotional attachment to their
parents be considered as a trait that can be “spandrelized”? (Maybe there’s a
proper word for this but I don’t know it.)
This would certainly not be the way that many people, including quite a
few unconventional psychologists and counselors, think about it. It’s commonly, but incorrectly, assumed that
once an attachment relationship develops in early life, that attachment stays
the same unless something happens to stop it. For example, the death of a
parent and subsequent mourning would deactivate that attachment; some “parental
alienation” advocates hold that one parent can destroy or at least suppress a
child’s attachment to the other parent by emotional manipulation. People who
believe in these ideas apparently miss the fact that both attachment behavior
and cognitive abilities that are part of thinking about attachment change in
the normal course of development, and this contributes to changes in the nature
of relationships that originated in toddler’s emotional connections to familiar
adults.

So where does the spandrel part come into this? What I
am going to say is speculation, just like most of the Just-So stories that are
put forth as ideas about the evolution of behavior. But it is possible to make
the case that attachment began as a result of natural selection for certain
advantageous behaviors, and then later was put to work for other purposes.

Many birds and mammals show some form of “attachment”
to parents. Ducklings and goslings, for example, follow moving objects that
they see soon after hatching, and those objects are most likely to be their
mothers. Whatever kind of object they initially follow, they will during early
life follow that same object, and in adulthood will court and attempt to mate
with a similar object. This initially serves a protective function and
encourages survival, because although a mother duck might not be able to fight
off a fox, her behavior against a predator does increase the young duck’s
chances of escape. The same consideration applies for young humans, whose
curiosity and exploratory behavior could lead them straight to an enemy if they
were not “attached” so that they stayed close to familiar adults and avoided
strange creatures. Whereas ducks and some other animals form their
“attachments” shortly after birth or hatching, humans, who are very immature at
birth and cannot move independently for many months, do not show attachment
behavior until roughly the time when they might be able to wander away.

Looking at it this way, we can see the enormous
survival value for the young of preferring to stay near familiar adults and being
wary of strangers and unfamiliar creatures. But within a few years after birth,
human children become much more able to judge danger and to keep themselves
safer (perhaps not in today’s high-speed traffic, but in the environment of
early adaptation). They don’t need attachment for survival in the same way, yet
they retain strong relationships with familiar adults under many circumstances,
and do this right up until their own adulthood, often modulating into a
“reversed” relationship when an aging parent needs the adult child’s care.

Feelings and thoughts about attachment thus lose much
of their survival value after the child gets to “school age”, but those
feelings and thoughts can be seen as serving new, useful purposes for both the
individual and the group-- in other
words, attachment has become a spandrel. For the individual, behaviors learned
from experiences in the attachment relationship can provide a foundation for
understanding other social relationships—that is, they form the internal
working model (IWM) of relationships that John Bowlby proposed. The IWM allows
the older child and adult to participate in any social relationship with some
confidence in assumptions about how social interactions work. The individual
does not have to develop new rules from scratch about interacting with any new
person he or she meets, and this saves time and energy.

The community also benefits from the attachment
spandrel for several reasons. One is that the social rules learned in the early
attachment relationship help young adults care for their own children
effectively and enlist other community members to help in this task when
needed. In addition, the community
survives and thrives better when social interactions among members are orderly
and constructive, when conflicts and aggressive impulses are modulated by
attachment-influenced social rules. For just one more, community values and
beliefs are more easily shared and passed on in the context of existing close
relationships where they are modeled and implied, than if they had to be taught
through direct instruction.

Thinking about attachment after the toddler period as
a spandrel can be a helpful way to understand how some aspects of attachment
work. But the really basic point is that attachment changes through the course
of development, and that toddler attachment, fascinating though it is, cannot
be considered to define the nature of attachment later in life.

Monday, July 3, 2017

Now and then I encounter questions about some abusive
practices that are done as part of unconventional “attachment therapies”.
Adopted and foster children are often the targets of practices advised by
non-mainstream therapists, counselors, and coaches of various stripes. The
suggested methods can include all or some of the following:

·Limiting the quantity and variety of
children’s diets

·Requiring children to “strong sit”
tailor-fashion for periods of time without speaking or moving

·Insisting that children ask permission for
everyday actions that are normally handed independently after age 2 or 3, such
as using the toilet or getting a drink of water

·Punishing children who eat or drink
without permission by forcing eating or drinking of large quantities

·Confining children to a bedroom or a
basement for many hours, sometimes providing only a bucket for sanitary purposes

·Placing alarms on bedroom and cupboard
doors

·Removing all but minimal furniture from
the bedrooms where children spend much of their time

These methods are claimed
to be directed at creating parent-child attachment and preventing children from
becoming murderers in later life—claimed goals that would certainly get the
attention of most parents and make them likely to work zealously to do as they
are told.

The first problem, of
course, is that these methods have nothing to do with creating attachment,
attachment has nothing to do with murder, and thus the methods do not treat
either mental illness or criminal tendencies a child may have.

The second problem? Well,
this is what I want to get at. I hear from worried people who tell me they have
seen a sister or neighbor or someone else who seems to be using methods like
those above. Sometimes they have reported to child protective services,
sometimes they haven’t but wonder if they should—don’t want to get anyone in
trouble unnecessarily but don’t like the looks of the situation, etc. What
would happen if they reported?

Generally speaking,
nothing would happen.

Unless a child is injured
or killed as a result of an adult action, using methods like the list above is
not illegal. Research definitions of child abuse contain categories that most
of those items would fit into, but laws about child maltreatment do not. Like
most laws, those laws have the goal of covering as much territory as is needed
without getting into too many details. We
don’t have laws that say not to lock the child in a bedroom, because such a law
could easily be evaded by locking the child in the basement, woodshed, broom
closet, or garage instead. A law can’t include all the possible places a child
could be locked up. And, we don’t want a law that will punish parents for child
abuse if they accidentally shut a door and leave a child locked in until they
hear him yelling five minutes later. Many of the things on that list are
actions that a parent might carry out unintentionally or in a very mild form. (“You
took that extra pancake that your sister wanted, now I want you to eat it!”)

Because we do not have
such very detailed laws about child abuse, and because most parents might
occasionally do something that was a bit like the items on the list, it would generally
be assumed that any parental act that would be considered abusive must pass a
pretty high bar-- one that could not be
met by insisting someone eat the pancake he swiped or ask permission before
eating something specially prepared for a party. As a result, a complaint about
one incident of a listed action would
not—and probably should not—be given much attention by a child protection
agency. Even a set of complaints about many items on the list would probably
not contain any one item that would reach that high bar. The items on the list
would not even be picked up by a checklist of adverse childhood experiences
(ACEs) that are known to be associated with problematic developmental outcomes.

Each item is too little to trigger official action,
but many repetitions of many items are
likely to form a pattern of experience that includes too much adversity to foster good development. Just as an
accumulation of small injuries can lead to untoward physical consequences, it
seems possible that repeated psychological injuries can have an outcome that is
greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, there is usually no way for a
concerned observer to report a pattern of problems; an outsider sees only the
occasional event and has no way to know what happens between times. Even if the
pattern were carefully recorded, child protective staff may have no mechanism
for interfering when each incident, standing alone, looks unpleasant but minor.
The parent’s actions may not be “best practice”, but which of us can claim that
we always make the best choices? There is plenty of evidence that we just need
to be “good enough parents”, and we do not really have clear standards about
what is “good enough”.

I would like to propose
that agencies and organizations move toward recognizing the patterns of
multiple, apparently low-impact, possibly cumulative, but risky, parenting
behaviors. At the least, such an approach could prevent some of the child deaths
from slow starvation and exposure that crop up in the news with relentless
regularity. At the most, such an approach, coupled with parent education and
supervision, could improve the chances of excellent developmental outcomes for
large numbers of children now at risk.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.